Prologue Summary:

The Prologue is an introduction to the complex narration of how one man came to recognize his own invisibility. It begins by acknowledging invisibility and proceeds to describe the state of the narrator's life as it will be after the final chapter but before the Epilogue. Thus the twenty-five chapters which follow the Prologue explain to the reader the events which put the narrator underground where he currently living.

He first describes what he means by invisible. He is not a ghost or a man with transparent skin. He is invisible by virtue of how others react to him. They do not accept his reality and thus live as though they do not see him. He gives a more direct example by explaining how he almost killed a white man whom he bumped into on the street. He continued to attack the white man as long as the man refused to apologize and kept insulting him. The narrator then realized that the man does not see him as an individual and the narrator walked away laughing at the thought that the man was almost killed by a "figment of his imagination".

The narrator takes his revenge on society in silent, unsuspecting ways, such as stealing electricity from a power company by wiring his room full of light bulbs. He resolves to cover even the floor of his underground hole with bulbs, out of spite and a desire to hold and control as much light as possible. Light is truth and vice versa, he claims. In this way, his hibernation will be warm and well lit and he will continue to be alive.

Music is another source through which he gains power in his lair. By listening to Louis Armstrong, he hopes to feel his body vibrate and to become aware of a new sense of time. He explains that when he smokes a reefer one day, the music takes on a new meaning and he sees into the spaces between time. His dreamlike state finds him asking a woman of his illusions what freedom is and her son telling him that he must learn it from himself. Until then, he blames society for his irresponsibility and admits to his own cowardice.

Analysis

In the narrator's description of what makes an invisible man, he points out that the fault lies in the beholder and is a problem with the construction of the beholder's inner eye. It is important to note that he is referring to the characters, such as Reverend Barbee, Brother Jack, and himself, who will appear throughout the novel in connection to blindness, real or imagined, and how this will be a commentary on their inner eye more than a physical illustration. The other characters' perception of the narrator is skewed because they create a world in which the narrator is meant to fulfill their destinies and choices; they never ask him for input or recognize his individuality. He plays the part of the tool or the puppet so many times that he is driven to bump strangers on the street, as in the case of the blond man, simply in order to recognize his own existence in their eyes. Yet, in the case of the blond man he fails as well and runs away in the dark as he will do time and time again during the novel. Symbolically he runs from boxing ring to boxing ring, beginning with the battle royal (in the first chapter) and continuing through to his fight with the blond man. His memory of the prizefighter against the yokel is an important allegory he provides. The narrator is the yokel in the narrative who is beaten round after round until he recognizes his ability to exist outside of the scientifically categorized world he lives within, most recognizably represented by the Brotherhood. The power structure then becomes more fluid and the yokel escapes his traditional role.

The narrator thus avoids classification because he exists between it and outside of it, similar to his heightened ability to experience the time and space inside of music. He comments that he neither is dead or suspended. Instead he fulfills more of a "dead-in-living" stage which Brother Jack will advise him against in the story. Overcoming the definitions enforced upon him, he lives through the light he steals, the knowledge, which he has begun to realize is found only in himself. While smoking the reefer, he imagines a old woman who loved her slave master although he had impregnated her. The narrator finds it amazing that she has found freedom through that love and hopes to understand her definition. But her definition will not work for him and his questioning upsets her. By the epilogue, he turns those questions inward and though he does not find a definitive answer, he looks in the right place. Until that time, he will still fear the tread of Ras and Rinehart behind him, characters who he is forced to face in his narrative and who haunt him in the role he takes on afterwards. In order to conquer all of these fears, he understands the need to weave together his words and his life into a whole.

Chapter 1 Summary:

The first chapter provides quite a contrast to the novel's Prologue as the narrator takes the reader back to his experiences as a naive high school student. The chapter focuses on a gathering of the town's most influential white citizens held the day after the narrator's graduation. Because of the narrator's well-received oration at graduation, he is asked to repeat his speech at the gathering, which he deems a great honor. Upon arriving at the fancy ballroom, he learns that before his speech he must first participate in the "battle royal" to be fought by several black boys hired for the occasion. The boys are led into the main hall where the narrator is shocked at the drunkenness of many of the town's most respected members. Half naked, the boys are only part of the night's entertainment. Pushed to the front of the hall, they are brought into full view of a naked, blond woman who is expected to dance for the crowd. The incredible humiliation of the scene causes most of the boys to want to run away but they are kept in place as the white men of the group chase the terrified woman around the room. The next event of the night directly involves the narrator and other boys; they are all made to wear blindfolds and enter the boxing ring. Covered in darkness, voices from the smoky room yell jeers and taunts to the boys until they are incited to fight. The fighting becomes hysterical and crazed, though slightly less tortuous for the narrator when he maneuvers his blindfold in such a manner to allow a little vision and more control over his fights. Suddenly, however, he is left in the ring as one of the final two who must fight until one wins. The narrator is mostly concerned that he will not get a chance to relay his speech, finally deciding to just fall to the floor with one of Tatlock's punches. The boys are then taunted one last time when the white men throw gold coins onto a carpet and encourage them to grab for the money. The carpet turns out to be electrified, and a jolt is received by anyone touching a coin. The narrator attempts to grab as many coins as possible without touching the carpet and does so, almost throwing a seated white man onto the carpet by holding onto his chair leg. The narrator is then finally allowed to give his speech during which the men do not even bother to listen. Regardless, the narrator receives a scholarship at the end of the night and is so pleased that he ignores the earlier shame and the voice of his dying grandfather which continues to haunt him in his dreams.

Analysis:

The structure of the first chapter is a series of events told from memory with the expressed purpose of teaching the reader why later events will unfold. Not only is the chapter prefaced with an explanation of its goal but it also ends, somewhat cyclically, professing how the narrator himself did not understand the nature of the events which took place. He states that he would not make sense of the experience until attending college, thus prefacing the next chapter. With the author's intentions consciously in mind, the reader then has an easier time recognizing the weighted symbolic images involved within the chapter. The grandfather is a device used by Ellison to foreshadow heavily the rest of the novel as well as enhance the illustrations presented during the chapter. Appearing at the beginning and the end, the grandfather provides a lesson to the young narrator which his parents then tell him to ignore. The guilt of treachery that his grandfather instills in him follows him into the gathering of white men and ends the chapter haunting him in a dream that, he notes, he has dreamt often since. The experience of the gathering is the beginning of a race against himself, as the grandfather writes in the dream: "Keep this Nigger-Boy Running".

The battle royal represents the state in which the white men of the society enjoy keeping the black men, a state of darkness, confusion, and fear. In addition, the white men can vicariously live out their desire to be less civilized, as they become in reality by constructing the event and by creating a blind rage within the boys they have hired to fight. The boys are blinded by a white blindfold - an easy metaphor - which the narrator circumvents in order to approach the battle royal slightly less like an animal. Before he moved the blindfold though, he notes that he had never truly experienced darkness before and it scared him. In this manner, his invisibility is again foreshadowed as the reader knows that he will fade as a character into more darkness as the novel progresses.

The idea of invisibility surfaces most within the chapter during the speech, which the narrator has continued to practice for even in the most humiliating of moments. Increasing the hypocrisy embedded in the upright citizens gathering, the men not only fail to listen to the speech but yell to the narrator to speak up when his throat is choked by blood. Nauseated and overwhelmed, he makes the mistake of saying "social equality" instead of "social responsibility" and is almost thrown out of the room. Only by thoroughly swallowing the hypocrisy of the room and the events he has had to participate in can he finally exit the scene without further harm and in the possession of his prize. Sadly, the narrator accepts this prize as an award well worth his humiliation. He cannot yet understand his grandfather's message because he still refuses to spit out the blood and speak for himself.

Chapter 2 Summary:

The chapter opens with a description of the college which the narrator attends. The wistful illustration is given from the perspective of the later narrator speaking from his underground lair. The focus then shifts to one day in particular, Founder's Day, when the multi-millionaire trustees visited the campus. The narrator is given the honor of driving one trustee, Mr. Norton, around the school. Norton asks him to just drive since he is early for his next event. The narrator finds himself pulling off the highway onto an unknown road while Norton speaks about his interest in the school and its students. He feels that he has affected the narrator and other students' destinies much like the hand Ralph Waldo Emerson had in the fate of the African-American. He explicitly tells the narrator that he is Norton's fate and he feels as strongly as he does because of losing his beautiful, delicate daughter years ago when they were touring the world. Showing her picture to the narrator and explaining her death are actions which surprise the narrator who does not feel it is safe to open up to others in that manner. Norton continues to speak of his fate and asks the narrator to contact him once he knows of his own. By seeing the fruits of the labor he has committed to the school, Norton believes he is creating a memorial to his daughter.

Not really paying attention to where they were going, the narrator soon drives past a poor region of shacks and log cabins. Regretting going into this area, the narrator cannot stop Mr. Norton from wanting to stop once he eyes a log cabin. The cabin belongs to the sharecropper Trueblood who was recently shunned by the college for the alleged incest he committed. After telling Norton about the inhabitants, Norton demands to speak with Trueblood. Trueblood goes into his narrative as he has told the story many times before. He lay in bed a long time one night with his daughter, Mattie Lou, between him and his wife, Kate, as they always slept. He lay thinking about the boy Mattie Lou was seeing and how she was becoming a woman. Then his thoughts strayed to an old girlfriend he had when he was younger. Mattie Lou moved next to him like she is dreaming about being with the boy. Trueblood recounts that he turned away from her but could still feel her moving as he fell asleep and had the dream.

In the dream, he is looking for meat and is sent to Mr. Broadnax's house, a white man in town, to find it. Entering the house, he does not see anyone so he goes through a door into a bedroom where he finds a woman. The woman does not understand that he wants to see Mr. Broadnax and grabs him to keep him away from her grandfather clock. He throws her onto the bed were she disappears and he runs into the clock. Truebloods says he he woke up astounded by his dream and is shocked to find himself on top of his daughter, who is crying. He tries not to wake up his wife so that he will not have sinned. But Mattie Lou starts squirming and neither of them can stop moving once they start. Kate wakes up in horror, screams at him, and gets a shotgun. He talks her out of that but she drags in an ax and strikes him in the face. Trueblood leaves but decides to return and take responsibility for his actions. He learns that he has impregnated both his wife and daughter. As a result, the black community in town scorns him whereas the white community supports him more than they ever had earlier. Norton gives him a hundred dollar bill and he and the narrator leave with Norton asking the narrator to find him some whiskey as he is feeling ill.

Analysis:

The seemingly bucolic description of the narrator's "beautiful college" which begins the chapter is deceptive as Ellison throws in negative images to upset the balance and shadow the story with a darker foreboding sense. His tone is ironic as he mentions the path that turns off to the insane asylum or how "boys in the know" were given special treats by the gay nurses. His pure campus was truly anything but that. His irony stresses the point that his days in college were blinded. The many questions he asks concerning the reality of his memory illustrate the questionable quality of his existence when he was a student at the school. The one clear day he remembers from his college experience is the day when his world there fell apart. Driving the trustee Mr. Norton around campus, he makes an early error when he tries to suppress a burp and honks the horn. Ellison remarks on the hypocrisy embedded in Norton from the very beginning, mentioning that he has held the white man's burden for forty years. The horn blasting represents a lesson to the narrator which he refuses yet to hear: in attempting to suppress who he is, he in fact creates a larger disaster. On a larger scale, the car is also a metaphorical vehicle through which the narrator hopes to move closer to the college's heritage but which inevitably brings him further toward disaster as he tries to please the college's leaders and benefactors.

A curious moment occurs when Norton asks the narrator whether he has read Ralph Waldo Emerson, alluding to the fact that Ellison was named after the author. One can pick up from the fact that the narrator has not read Emerson that he is not in touch with the idea of self-reliance, one of Emerson's main points, nor is he in touch with the author either. He is a displaced, lost character. However, Norton is not the type of character who would be the most knowledgeable on how the narrator should spend his life and the reader is not surprised to learn that he cares about the narrator's destiny because he claims it as his own. The old faded picture of his daughter strikes the narrator not because she is beautiful as Norton claims but because of how she is presented. The appearances of Norton and his daughter trick him into giving them reverence simply based on who they are. He spends much of the ride attempting to pin down Norton's feelings and whether he was pleased with the narrator. As the narrator says himself, he "half-consciously followed the white line".

Uncovering further along this line of pretense, Jim Trueblood mentions how the white community had been surprisingly supportive after the incest. He is effective in his speech with Mr. Norton, who also rewards him monetarily for his act, because it is without pretense. His very name is suggestive, as he is true to his blood, his nature. This manner thus guilts the white community into paying off the state they have created whereas it shames the black community who does not want to recognize any who could work against their success. The narrator looks away in shame at Trueblood's audacity during the storytelling. The act of storytelling within the narrator's act of storytelling is also suggestive. Upon closer examination of the dream which Trueblood talks about, one notices that it is strangely symbolic of the entirety of the narrator's story, picking up on the themes of a race without a finish line and an awakening out of the tunnel of darkness. Symbolically too, when he wakes up, reality is worse than his illusion had been. Faced with this kind of reality, it is no wonder Mr. Norton, a trustee of the illusion, feels faint and desires liquor.

Chapter 3 Summary:

The narrator brings Mr. Norton to the Golden Day bar because going into town would take too long. Along the way, the narrator drives past the veterans (mental patients) on their way to the bar as well. He convinces the patrons to let him in by convincing them that Norton is an army general. Annoyed at Trueblood and since the bar is an irreputable establishment, the narrator leaves Norton in the car and tries to get the whisky for him. Halley will not allow him to take it outside. The narrator returns to the car to find Norton unconscious and, afraid he is dying, he runs back inside for help. When he brings Norton inside, the vets surround Norton, calling him names and jerking his head around. Halley pushed them aside and pours whiskey into his throat, reviving the old man. He stares around at the odd collection of patients who begin to talk to him wildly until Supercargo, their attendant, shouts at them to stop.

Without his uniform on and having drunk too much, Supercargo's authority is rebuked and the patients charge him, throwing the place into an uproar. Bottles flying, they attack Supercargo, knocking him out despite Norton's yelling. Trying to escape the chaos, the narrator attempts to find Norton whom has become separated from him. The narrator finds Norton unconscious again and does not know what to do until a short fat man helps him bring Norton upstairs and finds him a bed to lie upon. The prostitutes who had been upstairs stand around him, musing over his features. They are thrown out by the vet, who claims he used to be a doctor.

As Norton comes to, the narrator is frozen with fear. The vet explains to Norton what has happened and successfully diagnoses Norton while the narrator is out of the room. The vet and Norton become engaged in a conversation, concerning the vet's life after being enrolled in the college. As Norton begins to feel better, one of the women returns and the narrator becomes anxious to leave. The vet continues to talk in an increasingly esoteric manner, refuting Norton's idea of destiny. Angered, Norton and the narrator finally exit the Golden Day and drive back to the campus.

Analysis

It is not a surprise that the Golden Day bar and brothel is on the other side of the railroad tracks. The Golden Day, on this day in particular, is a microcosm of the world gone crazy. The vets are all institutionalized yet represent men who have held a myriad of professions. The way in which the narrator often feels at the brothel is mirrored in his later feelings in New York, namely that he is part of some game in which he cannot grasp the rules. It is also not a surprise then that he will meet one of the most lucid characters of the book in the brothel before he leaves.

The narrator notices that Norton has passed out and his lips fall back showing his teeth. With all of the craziness which occurs inside the Golden Day, Ellison makes a point to illuminate Mr. Norton as an animal as well when he mentions the "amazingly animal-like teeth" which are normally hidden behind his lips and his words. This case of synecdoche is echoed by Mr. Norton's involvement in the patients' fight with Supercargo. The narrator is surprised to hear him yell out. Furthermore, once upstairs with the vet doctor, the women who are watching relate his organs to animal organs, slowly adding pieces together over the narrative which make Norton very animalistic indeed.

The vet doctor gives interesting insights into the reality which the narrator will refuse, in its totality, until the end of the novel. Another episode of storytelling takes place and again reflects upon later events. Mention of the great white father will come up later with Brother Jack. Moreover, the Vet speaks of his struggle against and for life, being a doctor, but is punished for saving it and realizes that his contribution was worthless. He predicts rightly that the narrator will later feel similarly, repressing his emotions like a mechanical man. In response, Norton calls him insane.

Chapter 4 Summary:

Driving back, the narrator is filled with fear over how Dr. Bledsoe will react to the events which occurred on the drive. Visions of Tatlock and Trueblood flash through his mind, along with the notion that the campus and the ideals of the Founder are the only identity he has. He drops Mr. Norton at his room with orders to bring Bledsoe to him. Facing Bledsoe, the man he most admires, he is forced to explain that Norton had a fainting spell. Bledsoe is appalled that the narrator took Norton back to the poor quarters, curtly stating that he should have better sense than to show any white person what they wish him not to see.

Dr. Bledsoe's demeanor changes completely upon seeing Norton, taking on the aspects of a concerned and appeasing grandfather. He apologizes profusely for the narrator's actions, refusing to listen to Norton's and the narrator's protests. The narrator is told to go to his dorm room and stay there until chapel. Norton promises to explain.

Back in his room, he continues to mull over the day, confounded by Bledsoe's lecture in the car. He is called to Bledsoe later in the day and expects to find him in Norton's room. Norton explains that Bledsoe can be found in his office after chapel and that he believes Bledsoe understood the rationalization he gave to him about the drive.

Analysis:

Driving back through the gates of the school with Mr. Norton, the narrator recognizes that the school suddenly looks as threatening and divisive as the highway's white dividing line, an image we picked up on earlier. With this simile, Ellison sets up the college as presenting pretense in much the same manner as the white line the narrator had hitherto been following. In cyclical fashion, the narrator makes an error with the car entering the gates as he had leaving . He senses a loss of control over the car. Symbolically, as the burp before predicted the disastrous trip, the loss of control he feels on returning and the linking of the college's green lawns with pretense predicts his inability to live as a part of the college any longer. He is losing control of his identity, as the narrator mentions explicitly. Denouncing the men they ran into during the drive, the narrator leaves himself on the white dividing line, neither accepted by Dr. Bledsoe and the college or the men who speak without superficiality such as Trueblood or at the Golden Day. In these highly hyperbolic and metaphorical terms, the narrator momentarily sees the school turn into a world of overwhelming whiteness. The narrator is incapable of understanding what Bledsoe means when he refers to the pretense he has set up, by only taking and giving the white people what he wanted them to have. An image that relates to this is the fish tank positioned outside of Mr. Norton's room, containing a feudal castle and a fish which is frozen no matter how fast his fins move. Ellison's thematic race is alluded to as the narrator is also stuck in a hierarchy he does not understand, and will spend the rest of the book trying to escape from without actually progressing.

The narrator is separated symbolically again from the college after returning to his dorm room. By contrasting the perky roommate with his hopeful girlfriend, the narrator brings up that she will probably become pregnant. Though seemingly a negative, that symbol of fertility differs greatly with the mood his roommate leaves the narrator in. His life seems to be departing from him, as he notices the departing voices took more than their noise with them down the hall. The knock which preceeds his meeting with Dr. Bledsoe follows directly after and is rendered by a freshman. That youth and freshness also sets up a good comparison against the narrator whose experience has so quickly rotted.

Chapter 5 Summary:

Hearing vespers, the narrator moves across the campus along with the student body toward the chapel where the visitors would be gathered. Tormented by the thought of his meeting with Bledsoe which will follow, he moves in a daze, suffocated by the spring in the air, and sits in the chapel, remembering. He recalls the hymns they have sung that the visitors love, and the speeches which have been given illuminating them to their world and to the roots which have given rise to it. He remembers giving important speeches to lead the student body. His thoughts fall into and around the old woman, the guardian of the girls, who has sat in on all these events. He muses on how he aimed his feelings and his speeches toward characters like her. She had spoken of his promise. And, she would be the one he felt the most shame toward on the night after the drive. His focus shifts next to Dr. Bledsoe, who sits solemnly up front with the trustees but is felt more by the students. His reputation is untarnished and his path to the top has given him power.

The ceremonies begin with a young girl singing, followed by a prayer and more singing. Drawing himself back to the events, the narrator realizes that a guest has started to speak with amazing command. Reverend Barbee, the speaker, resembles a little Buddha and speaks about the Founder and the dream of the college in such a moving manner that the narrator feels numb and more in love with the college and what it stands for than ever before. It is an epic that Barbee tells: of the Founder escaping slavery, and of the tearful tragic end which he comes to, witnessed by Barbee and Bledsoe. On a trip to spread his message, the Founder falls during a moving speech and is hurried away. On the train ride which follows, the men can feel the Founder's spirit weakening. After his death, Bledsoe becomes the new leader, paying homage to his friend and picking up where he had left off. Barbee ends with deep praise of the school and the progress which Bledsoe has made in continuing the Founder's mission.

Barbee himself falls over at the end of his speech and the narrator realizes that he is blind. Following his departure from the stage, more songs are sung as the narrator sits in great turmoil. He fears that after that astonishing speech, Bledsoe will be even more harsh with him for putting the school in even the slightest of dangers.

Analysis:

Feminine imagery surfaces again in the beginning of this chapter as the narrator describes the campus's atmosphere of budding springtime: fertile with a "feminine fluting". The looming moon shadowing the landscape throws the imagery into another light with its red glare which he compares to a white man's bloodshot eye. The image has been cracked and distorted. The disturbed aspect of innocence translates into entrapment as the narrator continues with his illustration. An indirect allusion to the battle royal can be understood as he describes the stage where the millionaires have come down to to experience the "flesh and the blood." The last sentence of the paragraph is trapped within parentheses, rhetorically asking if anyone could doubt the authority on this stage. We are asked immediately to doubt the freedom of reality implied within the preceding words. The narrator admits that he too has stridden this stage as a student leader, yet remarking that his words had always echoed back at him.

The event at chapel which affects the narrator most is the speech of the Reverend Barbee. Here the reader is faced with yet another example of storytelling within storytelling. Not only is it a story though, it is one which has been told many times before him. And this story too has echoes of the how the narrator's life will proceed, touching on points such as an underriding conspiracy, a funeral procession, and the journey underground. Another clue of this man falling into a pattern of the narrator's life is the dark-glasses the reverend "hides" behind, a notion which will surface in later chapters. Barbee is described as Buddha-like, but what is most surprising to the narrator about his physical qualities is the shock that he is blind. Thus pretense is suggested; Barbee can orally illustrate a story for others but cannot see himself. He is hiding his blindness behind the glasses while creating an illusion for the audience to see into and believe.

Chapter 6 Summary:

The narrator slowly and regretfully makes his way to Bledsoe's office after the chapel services. The president responds to him listlessly, reproaching him for not only going to the quarters with Mr. Norton but also taking him inside of the Golden Day. Mockingly, he brings up the incident with Trueblood as well, criticizing the narrator for giving into every want of Norton. By this point, he can no longer hold in his anger and he explodes, yelling at the narrator for his foolishness. Showing his naivete, the narrator is amazed when he hears that Bledsoe would have expected him to find excuses, to lie, instead of stopping in the slums or at a brothel. Bledsoe demands to know who told the narrator to drive where he did, shocking the narrator even further. He cries out that he is lying, and calls the narrator "nigger," enraging the narrator by using that word. When the narrator denies lying, Bledsoe reveals that he thinks the vet doctor is behind the drive and interrogates him regarding the man, noting that he will have to investigate the dangerous patient soon.

Becoming more and more desperate, the narrator attempts to defend himself by mentioning how Norton understands how it was beyond his control. Bledsoe snaps back that it is not Norton's decision and his understanding cannot make up for the incredible harm the narrator had caused. He is determined to expel the narrator, who threatens that he will tell Norton and fight to stay. Bledsoe relates that it does not matter who is told, the narrator does not amount to anyone and has no power in comparison to himself. He is at the controls and part of the larger set up of government power. He had won his place at the top by years of manipulation, of "playing the nigger" to some and acting tough to others.

Claiming to be impressed by the narrator's spirit, Bledsoe agrees to give him letters to important friends in New York where he can find a job and then pay his way back in the fall if all goes well. The narrator must leave within two days and after thinking over all day, he decides to leave as early as possible. Humiliated and ashamed, the narrator is outside of Bledsoe's office in the morning to retrieve his letters and then catches the first bus out of town. Bledsoe warns him to not read the letters, as the employers will be angered if they are tampered with.

Analysis

Leaving the chapel, the narrator feels immediately different and separated from the other students. Bledsoe also sets him apart from others when he is chastising his behavior with Mr. Norton by implying that a dumb slave would have had more common sense than he. The hyperbolic lecture continues as Bledsoe claims that he has ruined the college in a half an hour. Ellison writes that he looked at the narrator as if he had committed the worst possible crime. Everything about the man is big, his power and his head most notably. He finally feigns sympathy toward the narrator only when the narrator reacts in a big way, screaming threats at him.

His response though is based more in power, relating that the threats do him no harm as no one would believe the narrator against him. By telling the narrator that he does not exist, he is trying to emphasis his size and power over the boy's. He tells him that "his arms are to short to box" with him. The battle royal comes to mind again and the reader can begin to recognize Bledsoe as a different form of the bully than Tatlock, who was also giant in size. Notice too the blood reference in his name, like that of Trueblood's. Except his has a more negative connotation, he has sacrificed much of himself in order to be inflated to the high status where he must maintain his size in order to rule. When the narrator leaves the school the next morning, Bledsoe offers him his hand. The narrator notices that it is "large and strangely limp", a perfect representation for the whole which is Bledsoe.

Chapter 7 Summary:

To the narrator's annoyance, the vet doctor happens to be on the very same bus for the beginning of his trip. The narrator could not help but partially blame the vet for his foreshadowing of his misfortune. He would like to avoid all memories attached to the disastrous day he drove Mr. Norton. Questioning the narrator, the vet introduces him to the freedom and dream-like quality of New York. Annoyed at his concentration on women, especially white women, as the symbol of the freedom he will encounter, the narrator inquires of the vet, only to learn that the vet has been transferred to Washington. The vet rightly connects his conversation with Norton to the transfer. He begins preaching again to the narrator. He blames the white establishment. The vet exits at the first stop, and leaves the narrator with the parting advice to discover the world and leave the Mr. Norton's of the world alone.

Utterly alone, the narrator's confidence begins to resurface as the landscape becomes decidedly northern. He determines to be accommodating toward his contacts so to represent his school and people well. He heads to Harlem upon arriving in New York, more secure in himself and his prospects. The subway ride is his first shock as he is pushed up against a white woman who does not appear to notice. Secondly he is greeted with a larger quantity of black people in Harlem than he expects. Lastly, he encounters a man, Ras, loudly yelling to a crowd. Fearing a riot, the narrator cannot understand why the police do nothing. Instead, the police show him to Men's House where he finds a room.

Analysis:

The vet's presence on the bus away from the college is an unfortunate reminder for the narrator but a significant connection by Ellison to show how their fates intertwine, giving credence to the foreshadowing comments the vet doctor made at the Golden Day. The narrator is not allowed to blot out the memory as he would like and must listen to the vet talk until the first stop. The vet prophetizes even more by speaking of how New York will effect the narrator. His eyes give away his power in foretelling the narrator's future. He is continually winking at the narrator and his eyes twinkle when he relates to the narrator that though he lives a public life, he is not actually seen. The play with the visual is in complete opposition to the blindness that Barbee possessed. Although the narrator has a greater appreciation for what Barbee said, more truth lies for him in the twinkling eye of the vet.

Ironically, the seven little sealed envelopes which the narrator is not allowed to look at make him feel sophisticated and expansive. The sealed promises raise in him the chance for a positive future along the lines he had always imagined. Yet he is immediately made to feel small and insignificant in reaching New York. In the subway, he is pressed up against large people who do not notice his presence. Exiting the subway, he alludes to the story of Jonah in the Old Testament by comparing the experience to being thrown up from the belly of a whale. Jonah is one of the few stories in the Bible where a prophet chosen by God is misled in his motives and often fails in his tasks before he learns the right path. An apt allusion, he overwhelmed is by the city he is sent to. He is lost and the police have to direct him to Men's House.

Chapter 8 Summary:

The narrator sits in his room taking in his surroundings and musing over his life back home. He feels important when thinking about his letters and decides to plan out his strategy for the next morning. In order to visit his contacts, he would have to leave early and be at each office on time. He is determined to use this opportunity to become a young and better Dr. Bledsoe by giving the employers the charming man they would want to hire. On his way to his first office in the morning, he notices a number of Black professionals strutting down the street with leather pouches attached to their wrists and he imagines that their are messengers, chained to a great deal of money.

He makes his way to Mr. Bates' office, but does not want to go in too early in case the employer does not like to see Negroes early in the morning. Questioning many other aspects of himself, the narrator has to reconvince himself to go back for the interview. When he enters he finds a lone secretary who is much more amiable than he expects. She takes the letter from him and disappears into another room. She returns to report that Mr. Bates is busy but will contact him. Disappointed, the narrator repeats the episode with several other secretaries during his first days there, not having better success. He holds onto the letter for Mr. Emerson because he learns he is out of town. When he has not heard from the other men after a considerable amount of time, the narrator becomes suspicious of the secretaries and decides to set up an interview first and then give him the letter when he gets back to town. He also thinks about Mr. Norton, writing him a letter asking to meet, hoping that their more intimate relationship will be beneficial. Norton never responds.

More and more suspicious, the narrator thinks that Norton and Bledsoe may be part of a scheme concerning him and the employers, one which he does not know how to manipulate. A western movie cheers him up briefly and a dream of his grandfather brings him down. Finally, he receives a letter from Mr. Emerson.

Analysis:

In accordance with the allusion to the Bible, the only familiar object the narrator finds in his new room is the Bible. It makes him feel homesick. Trying to suppress his old ways and his anger toward Bledsoe, he succeeds more in splitting himself. He mentions he will speak differently in the north and the south in order to please different people. He concentrates on what he used to know and how he does not know now. Also, he continually stresses over whether what he is wearing or what time he arrives at the interviews will be satisfactory. His first days in New York are split as well, dropping his letters in the morning and exploring the city during the afternoon. He feels his life must be properly planned out in order to be successful and thus categorizes himself into different parts. His perfectionism is reflected in the numerous drafts of his letter to Mr. Norton that he writes before drawing up an immaculate one. The many pieces of himself are inadequate unless smoothed over and edited many times. Tellingly, his letter receives no reply.

The narrator's grandfather makes another appearance in his dreams while he waits expectantly for responses to his sealed envelopes. Already doubting the letters were received into the proper hands, the dream depresses him. He feels disjointed and a member of some unwanted scheme. Not ready to listen to these warnings, he is relieved by the response from Mr. Emerson.

Chapter 9 Summary:

Starting out to Mr. Emerson office, the narrator has high hopes. He walks along outside and is joined by a zoot-suiter who speaks to him in jive. Though he understands it little, he is entertained nonetheless. As he sits down to breakfast at a diner, he reflects on the manner he must enact, one of vague seriousness to keep people guessing as they did with Bledsoe. He settles on omnipresence as the secret, thinking of how Bledsoe is always in his students' minds.

Entering Emerson's office, the narrator is deeply impressed by the luxuriousness of it, remarking that it must be an importing firm. A man surprises him and takes the letter from him. A few moments later, he invites him into an office and asks him questions. The narrator is put on edge when asked if he would consider attending another college and if he had opened the letters. The man babbles about Harlem clubs and his father, finally returning to the point in vague terms, asking the narrator to trust him. The narrator gets very angry and wants to given his opportunity to meet with Emerson. The man reveals that Emerson is his father and shows him the letter from Bledsoe, which states that the narrator will never be enrolled at the college again, and asks the employers to assist Bledsoe in keeping the narrator from trying to return. The reasons given to the contacts is that the narrator has gone astray and presents a danger to the delicate situation of the college.

Dazed, the narrator goes to leave but is asked by Emerson's son to keep the letter's contents a secret. The narrator agrees knowing that no one would believe him. The son mentions a job opening at Liberty Paints and wishes him luck. The narrator cannot help but feel betrayed and compares himself to a robin picked clean. Deciding to go back to the college and kill Bledsoe for playing him like a fool, he resolves to get any job immediately to fund his revenge. He is told to report to the paint plant the next day.

Analysis

The narrator meets with a zoot-suiter the next morning when he sets off for his meeting.He is also involved in the race that Grandfather refers to and the narrator is subject to but is resolved to take it at his own pace. He significantly makes the point that he will not be run into the grave and hopes to coast downhill as much as possible. He is resisting the dominating factors of society against him but the narrator insists that one should keep to one path. The man's speech though is much more rapid than his travel and the narrator cannot keep up with it. All the narrator knows is that he likes the sound and speed of it. He remembers it from childhood but cannot remember it. Racing faster than the man, talking slower, lost to the memories of their shared past, the narrator has been culturally erased. He belongs to no community and accordingly everything the man says and does hits the narrator off balance. He cannot even decide whether he feels "pride or disgust" towards the man after he leaves.

The room he enters of Mr. Emerson's office is like a museum filled with colors, relics, and tropical animals. The aviary of birds sits near a bay window and when the narrator is left to himself in the main office, he wishes he could examine it but is worried that t may seem unbusinesslike. The birds are noticed after a period of silence they begin to rapidly flap their wings. It is described as savage. Ellison purposely makes the office both colorful and primitive. The birds flash with life for a moment, singing a tune and flapping their colorful wings. But the surge stops and the narrator is too scared to go see. The symmetry of the situations is striking. In the white mans' office he is taking a colored object and caging it. The birds can look upon New York from the window and can stretch their wings for an instant, but then are again confined. The narrator stands frozen across the room, admiring them as through a window but is kept by fear of the same white man to move any closer, thus being caged in himself. Any diversion or flash of life he might show could result in his expulsion, so he sits quietly in his cage and waits for his interview to let him fly around the room for a moment.

The facial and bodily expressions of the man who interviews him are detailed extensively by Ellison. After every comment he makes, he either looks pained and twists his body in some way or must hold back a scream. At one point he asks the narrator whether he cares to look beyond the face of matters and the mistake the narrator makes is his response that he does not care about the other things beyond the surface. Unable to understand even beyond the face of the man's comment, the narrator is shocked to learn that the man is Emerson's son, though his torment and pointed comments lead to something being strange. More importantly, he warns the narrator not to be blinded by the truth, an idea which keeps recurring in the text. The birds scream with fear as the narrator leaves the office, again acting as the parallel of his situation. The birds are set to reflect the sentiments he comes to in a minute. Bringing up another bird, the narrator realizes they have used him and picked him clean, like the robin in his song. They have kept him caged and running like some colorful toy or pet for their amusement.

Chapter 10 Summary:

Arriving at the plant, the narrator is sent to Mr. Kimbro who will be his boss. Mr. Kimbro, is very brusque and demanding, putting the narrator immediately on the job with very few instructions and the order not to ask questions. The narrator's first job is with the pure white paint that the company is known for. When the narrator mixes the wrong ingredient into the paint because he is afraid to ask Kimbro, the paint turns a dull gray underneath the white. Kimbro notices the difference and he is fired from the job and sent to another boss, Mr. Brockway. Brockway has a position in the basement as a sort of engineer, his education being years of experience at the plant, making the guts of the paint. Brockway is paranoid that the narrator is trying to take his job and is thus quite irritable toward him, asking him many questions about his past. He gives him a job checking the gauges on paint tanks and then is asked to shovel a mysterious brown pile into the machine. They get along agreeably enough for awhile; Brockway tells him stories of the boss begging him to come back to work and how he came up with the plant motto.

The peace ends after the narrator returns from retrieving his lunch. In the locker room he runs into what he thinks is a union meeting, where men who call each other brothers stare at him suspiciously and question whether they can trust him. Finally they allow him to get to his locker, by which point he has lost his appetite. He explains his delay to Brockway who explodes in anger at his participation in a union. Brockway physically attacks him, refusing to listen to the narrator's explanation. The narrator feels the tension snap inside him and fights off Mr. Brockway, knocking his teeth out. However, because of their inattention to the gauges in the room, the pressure goes over the allotted mark and Brockway laughing runs from the room as the narrator attempts to pull the valves back under control. He fails and the tanks burst. The narrator is covered in white paint and knocked unconscious.

Analysis:

The narrator's entrance to the paint plant is ominous as he must cross a bridge in the fog, implying that he is unable to see out and around him, and then he descends into a swarm of workers, implying facelessness. As he emerges into the plant then it seems as if he is merging with it too, being sucked up, losing sight and identity. Paint as a substance suggests the property of coverage, of hiding the material beneath the surface with a new, suffocating coat. By joining a plant which produces this covering substance, he becomes one of the tools of its creation. Ironically the companies name is Liberty Paints. Similarly his first task there is to make the pure white paint that the company is renown for. He mistakenly taints the purity and is fired. He is incapable of fulfilling their standards of whiteness. Hyprocrtitically, Kimbro allows a batch of impure white paint samples to be sent out anyhow. The narrator is inadequate but cannot figure out how he is supposed to act. His attempts though to cover reality are flawed.

Foreseeing later events, the narrator is sent down into the basement of the plant for his next task. He is in charge of keeping the gauges on tanks at an even keel, but at the end of the day, fails in this respect too. Brockway, his paranoid boss, invests in the narratives habit of interlocked storytelling. In explaining how the owner could not do without him and begged him to return to work when he had planned on retiring, Brockway, admits that he is at home underground, controlling the power he can get his hands on and being left alone by most of society. This echo rings deeply with that of the Prologue. He also tells of how he thought up the paint's motto. The narrator makes the connection to his own thinking that white is right. With this parallel to the vet doctor and Dr. Bledsoe, the danger inherent in producing the white paint takes on a broader meaning. That it explodes in his face is symbolic of his inability to control the pressures simply by watching a gauge or trying to fit himself into the boundaries designed by a dominant order of society.

The union meeting which the narrator walks into when he goes to get his lunch predicts the Brotherhood he will join later in the novel. However at this point, he is alarmed by the use of the term "Brother" and is quickly targeted as an enemy and an outsider. He feels stripped by the experience and is again frozen in his tracks. His fate is decided without his voice being allowed and he loses his appetite. The anger he feels even though he does not care to be a part of the group gives precedent for how easily he will be absorbed into the Brotherhood. It gives him structure and acceptance. In a plant priding itself on whitening and coverage, the narrator feels naked.He is turned on next by Brockway because of his hatred for unions. It does not matter that the narrator did not belong. He is torn on two sides, between defending himself at the union meeting and then to Brockway. As he and Brockway fight, the narrator knocks Brockway's teeth out before realizing that the man had bit him. Physically eaten away and consumed by the factory, the frantic pull he feels in all directions erupts in his face. In the end of the chapter, the paint does its job. He is covered and whitened.

Chapter 11 Summary:

The narrator wakes up to see doctors leaning over examining him. He is wearing new overalls and is given things to swallow. The doctors speak of him being stunned and needing to keep him under observation for a few days.Unable to provide his name, the doctors take another X-ray which the narrator is not quite capable of understanding in his state. He feels covered by nodes as someone in an electric chair. His mind is completely blank. He swims in and out of consciousness for what seems like days until he is again approached by questioning doctors. They argue over the better treatment, one feeling that surgery was best while the other supports his own machine which performs lobotomies without surgery. They discuss castration and his psychology as well. An electric current sent through him causes him to dance and he overhears comments about how blacks have rhythm but is not able to maintain a sense of anger. He is unable to differentiate between the world inside and outside of his eyelids.

Feeling lonely and bewildered, a man appears who thrusts cards in is face asking his name. He is unable to answer this or the subsequent cards asking for his mother's name and children's characters. Thrown into the role of a child, he is angered and lies mentally debating over his own identity. Finally, the doctors and a nurse release him from the tubes and machines and usher him into the director without allowing him to ask questions. The director notes that the narrator has been cured though the narrator never really knows from what. He is also told that he can no longer work at the plant but will receive ample compensation. The director blends in his mind with Mr. Norton and he asks if he knows the old man. Still feeling part of some scheme that Bledsoe and Norton have going against him, he begins to laugh but the director does not understand. The narrator leaves and wanders out around the plant, feeling strangely disconnected from his mind and body.

Analysis:

The narrator moves from being covered in white paint to being encased in a white, rigid chair. He is stared at and examined at the hospital like an object. In addition, he is wearing new clothes -- strange white overalls. He has a bitter taste in his mouth. For all intents and purposes, the narrator has become a science experiment. He is encased in a white world that he has tried to control for his own means but could not. At one point, he notices that he has been moved to a box with its lid open and is surrounded by machines. He is unable to maintain consciousness on his own, saying he fights against the waves of sleep but to no avail. The doctors feel they have been successful when the narrator admits that he cannot feel his head. He has been dispossessed and disembodied. The doctors argue over whether to cut him open or de-brain him through a non-surgical lobotomy. They discuss castration. He is a toy they play with as they look to change his personality and reconstruct a new man. He tries to hang onto his self and his past, yet is unsuccessful for the most part. For example, he hears songs from his youth but they are interrupted by pain. He open his eyes from the dreams and can only see glass and metal bearing down upon him. He becomes incapable of distinguishing between his body and the machines.

The future foreshadowed when he crosses the bridge has been fulfilled. He forgets his own name and his mother's name. They next ask if he remembers children's fictional characters and he is conscious of his state to the extent that he can realize that he has become a fictional character. In this world, he is their doll. His mind is so altered that he cannot defend himself. However, due to the trauma he undergoes in their white world, he is better able to comprehend its hypocrisy when he is released. He is not too far off the mark when he asks the hospital director if he knows Mr. Norton or Dr. Bledsoe. The narrator has become the robin of his song and is fully picked clean.

Chapter 12 Summary:

Still foggy, the narrator stumbles back toward the Men's House. Coming out of the subway, he falls on the street where he is helped by a strong, motherly woman named Mary Rambo. She moves the crowd away from him and inquires after his health. Though he replies that he is simply weak, she will not let him return to Men's House until he is fully recovered saying that he needed a woman to take care of him. The narrator hesitantly agrees to let her take him back to her house where he can rest and revive his spirits. He sleeps for a long time and awakes to see her sitting by him. She feeds him and asks him some questions about his condition. Though he is suspicious of her at first, she has good intentions and urges him to do something purposeful for the race. She warns him to watch out for corruption and offers him a place to stay if he ever needs it.

Returning to the House, he feels inferior because of his hospital stay and lowly employment and realizes that he can no longer reside there. In the lobby, he thinks that he sees Dr. Bledsoe from the back, as the familiar head administers to a small audience. Dumping a bucket of foul brown liquid on his head, he does not notice the others motioning him to stop. The man is a prominent preacher of the neighborhood and the mistake is foolish. He runs out into the street. When he returns, the porter tells him he must not come back after he packs up his property. The narrator immediately takes Mary up on her offer.

The beginning period at Mary's house is quiet. The narrator has lost his sense of meaning and direction and spends most of his time in his room thinking.He is torn between feeling secure under Mary's wing and being a disappointment to the woman who expected him to be worthy to his race. He remains frozen like this until he is awoken by his first northern winter.

Analysis

The narrator's entrance into Manhattan is a re-entrance. As he emerges from the subway onto Lenox Avenue, he is again belched from the whale and thrown into an overwhelming surge of people and things. Enormous light skin women press upon him as one woman did the first time he rode the subway. In this case, he has been reborn as a remade man, one picked clean and mechanized by machines, though these characteristics will surface more fully once he joins the Brotherhood. Still, it is not surprising that since he has been entirely stripped of his identity, the caged and picked bird collapses after he is thrown into Harlem a second time. Mary, the mother figure as implied by her Biblical name, arrives to restore the narrator to life so that the robin can function in his reconstructed world. Mary is a big, strong woman and he is pliant in her hands. She leads him to the dark coolness of her house which contrasts greatly with the bright, white world of the hospital and the orange sun which makes him faint outside of the subway. She replenishes some of what has been picked off of him, giving him food and sleep.

A bridge is mentioned again by Ellison which gives us insight into the moment. Mary's glasses sit low on the bridge of her nose, allowing her to look over them and see the narrator. She does not need any assistance to see the narrator clearly. She can sense that he has been at a hospital before she asks him. She tells him clearly, using a quotation derived from interviews Ellison conducted during the Depression, "I'm in New York but New York ain't in me...Don't get corrupted". Yet the damage to the narrator has already been done. The narrator wanders back to Men's House and instantly feels inferior as his overalls differentiate him from thced that the new emergence would be healthier than the unity of opposites, that pretense would be healthier than reality. The narrator cannot escape that easily though as he will later learn that there is no place for him inside of history. He had outrun Jack on the rooftops but does not succeed in shedding off the pretense of his existence for quite awhile.

Chapter 13 Summary:

Finally unable to contain his pent-up agitation, the narrator rushes forth from Mary's and allows his problems to whirl around in the cold air of winter for awhile. Still feeling alienated from society, he wanders the streets kept warm by the rage of his thoughts. Not knowing where to turn or what to do with himself, he is suddenly swept into nostalgic thoughts of home with the sharp smell of baking yams in the air. The vendor butters a yam for him and he is overwhelmed with homesickness. The memories that sweep up within him continue to boil the rage against his past and he finds himself verbally attacking Bledsoe and laughing outloud. Running back for another yam, he begins to think of yams as a life policy. Why should he be ashamed of his past or upbringing? He decides to eat them whenever he wants, and he will be happy.

Continuing down the street, he nears a crowd and hears an old woman sobbing. The narrator realizes that the streets are filled not with junk but with that woman's personal belongings. The crowd is animated in their opposition to the eviction occurring. Blurring the event, the narrator recognizes a self-conscious shame evident in the crowd from watching the dispossession of life inherent in the eviction. White men continue to carry items on to the street, ignoring the old couple's cries. They state that the event is legal and beyond their control. With each small piece of life the narrator notices, he becomes more emotionally and viscerally involved. The couple attempts to push inside to pray but is refused. The crowd is angered and plans to rush the white men, but the narrator runs to the forefront and takes control, telling them to remember that they are law-abiding people. He speaks strongly for several minutes, stating that the couple too was law-abiding and touching on how they all feel dispossessed. He incites them to all go inside the house and pray. The crowd works to carry the belonging back inside and the narrator moves inside as well. He is surprised when he notices a few white people as part of the crowd as questions which side they are on. More cops arrive. Deciding he better leave, the narrator is told by a white girl that he could leave over the rooftops and not be detected.

The narrator takes off running over the rooftops and notices soon that a short man is running after him. Afraid that he is a cop, the narrator wonders why the man never yells or shoots. Reaching the street, he loses the man and notices a doctor coming to deliver a baby. Suddenly, the little man is back and talking to him.Impressed by how his speech moved the crowd to action, the man takes him to get a coffee and talk. The narrator is cynical and becomes quickly annoyed by the sort of double talk the man uses. The man approaches the subject of possible employment. He suggests that he would be very effective as a spokesman for his people. The narrator says that he is not interested but takes his number and name, Brother Jack, in case he changes his mind. He walks back to Mary's mulling over the conversation with the man and the eviction. Then he thinks of Mary and her strength and feels better.

Analysis:

The hot water filling the narrator's body needs to be neutralized by the cold winter before the narrator feels safe venturing out of his hibernation. He mentions how the he is fueled by an inner fire to resist the cold. The whitened and chilled Harlem due to winter is symbolized in the store signs he passes advertising for beauty through the whitening of black skin. The yams that he finds being sold on the street provide a contrast to the whitening offer. The text states that "bubbles of brown syrup had burst the skin" of the yams. He consumes the food of his childhood, of the South, with homesickness. He refuses the urge to repress his natural tastes and Southern past in order to conform as he once thought was important. He eats the yam, goes back for seconds, and uses this food as a point to attack the negative aspects of his Southern upbringing. He attacks Bledsoe as an eater of lowly Southern food, such as chitterlings and other items. Thus he parallels Bledsoe's hypocrisy by eating his yams while he attacks Bledsoe for his effort "to play the Negro". He acknowledges that simply eating the food one likes is only hypocritical if one is using it as a means to appear subordinate. He allows a little more of his true brown syrup to break the skin and remarks that if he led his life as liberally as the experience of the yams had suggested, he would be a much happier person. The last yam he eats, however, is frostbitten. His efforts to avoid Bledsoe's trap have not been fully successful as of yet.

The dispossession the narrator feels at the hospital resurfaces as he comes upon an eviction in progress. An unclean bitter taste fills his mouth which is still reeling from the frozen yam when he realizes that he too is being dispossessed by the eviction. It is a personal dispossession. He compares it to a rotted tooth which consumes one's mouth with such a pain that one fears it being extracted. The dispossession causes him to feel nauseated. His pain is regurgitated in the form of his speech to the crowd. The narrator convinces the crowd to repossess the old couple's house with their furniture instead of acting out in violence. He trusts his feelings and takes charge of the situation.

When he meets Brother Jack, he does not trust the intuition which led him to take charge at the eviction. The superficiality of the Brother strikes him immediately as he comments that Jack acts like he is playing a part in a play. However, he dismisses the uncertainty and does not trust himself. Jack attempts to convince him that the old couple was a part of dead history and they must work on strengthening those with more potential. Jack hits on a very important point though which describes how the narrator will later illustrate himself when he becomes more enlightened regarding his situation of invisibility. He claims the old couple is "dead-in-living...a unity of opposites". Ironically, though, Jack tries to persuade the narrator to throw off part himself and become a new being, convin Ã,..."Ã,‚£S Ã,,? Ã,†' TÃ,,µ Ã,‚­ Ã,,-Ã,‚? Ã,,•

Chapter 14 Summary:

Nearing Mary's house, the narrator smells cabbage and is instantly depressed as it reminds him of his poor youth. He also realizes that the amount of cabbage she had made lately must mean she was short of money. He had not been able to pay rent for awhile and then he turned down a job offer. Feeling ashamed, he looks at the information given to him by Brother Jack over coffee. Mary calls to him and tells him to make sure to eat dinner. Instead he calls Jack in order to find out more about his offer. Not surprised by the call, Jack tells him to meet them as soon as possible. The narrator runs out and they pick him up and take him to a party at an expensive building, the Chthonian, where the rest of the Brotherhood is meeting.

At the party in the richly decorated room, the narrator senses a strange familiarity. Brother Jack leads him around, introducing him to several members, many of which have heard of his rousing speech at the eviction.They speak to Emma, Jack's mistress, for a few minutes as she pours them drinks and the narrator is surprised at her directness and lack of subtlety, especially as she asks Jack within hearing distance if the narrator is black enough for the job. On guard, the brothers sit down to business and attempt to explain the narrator's mission. Jack asks him if he would like to be the next Booker T. Washington. The narrator replies that he was not as great as the Founder. Jack illustrates that the scientific and realist methodology they hold will make him into an even greater figure than Washington. Feeling as if there is nothing to lose, the narrator accepts the mission and is told he will start the next day. He will also be given a new residence and a new identity. Jack gives him money to more than cover his debts to Mary and the meeting breaks up.

The rest of the evening, the narrator mingles with the new crowd, approached by many of them to converse over different social and political issues. One man who corners him is drunk and asks him to sing a spiritual. Outraged, Jack has him led away. In the moment of tension following, the narrator began laughing so hard that he cried and the rest of the room relieves their tension by laughing as well. Later in the night, he returns to Mary's, wondering about the new organization and the nature of the Brotherhood.

Analysis:

The cabbage smell that overwhelms the narrator on his return to Mary's represents some of the themes which have now been introduced, mainly consumption and uncleanliness. Mary, as the mother figure, is sacrificing her own comfort for the well-being of the narrator . She cooks the same inexpensive food over and again but will not ask the narrator for more money. The guilt this produces in him eats him up inside. He thus cannot eat the dinner or breakfast she prepares for him. His guilt pushes him into contacting Brother Jack. Thus, the narrator is also willing to make a sacrifice. He takes on a new, unknown job because of Mary's kind treatment toward him and the guilt he feels from letting her down. In order that she not be poor and unhappy, he changes his lifestyle. She claims a position in his life so pivotal that he takes on a new role in life with which he is at first uncomfortable.

The narrator senses danger when he is driving with the Brothers through Central Park. On the road again, the narrator is in a different position than when we last saw him in a car. He is not behind the wheel, figuratively as well as literally. He subconsciously drives Norton into the slave quarters, unwillingly revealing the truth behind Bledsoe and others. On this occasion, he is in even less control of their direction and is driven into uncharted territory. He notes that the Park is deceivingly calm and peaceful yet there are dangerous animals lurking in the nearby zoo. The danger lurking behind pretense is a theme which will strike at the narrator continuously.

The Chthonian sets the thematic tone for the Brotherhood as he senses that he has experienced it all before, for good reason. The feeling that there should be an elevator on the wall mirrors his uncomfortable experience with the elevator at the office of Mr. Bates. Moreover, the fancy building through which he is led from one group of people to another is paralleled by his experience at the elegant hotel of the battle royal. The narrator even dances with a white woman as the vet doctor predicted. Danger is most definitely lurking behind the pretense of his new lifestyle as is proven by the clues provided.

Another familiar situation is one where he feels interrogated or examined -- as if events are happening around him and to him but never with him. The narrator is asked how he would like to be the next Booker T. Washington. He does not know how to respond. He wonders if he is drunk because the room and its characters are spinning around him but no one seems to notice. The Brothers calmly stare at him, as if he is under observation. We will remember this sort of scene in the hospital when several times the narrator awoke and heard voices and saw doctors hovering over him watching. He was asked condescending questions which they had made him unable to answer. Similarly in this situation, he cannot answer what seems like a very easy question. However it also parallels the situation in the hospital because the question they have put to him surrounds his identity. He is hesitant concerning Washington because he feels the Founder was a better man. Much negative criticism surrounds Washington in society and Ellison would have used the name knowing he was often viewed as an accommodationist to the white establishment. The Founder though is a very similar man if he formed the world that made Bledsoe a leader. Instead of raising questions on Washington, the narrator replaces him with another, even stating that the Founder did much of the same kind of work that Washington did. Ellison reveals here the type of man that the Brotherhood wants the narrator to be and he is not able to yet grasp the hypocrisy inherent in it. He resolves to pattern his life on the Founder instead of creating his own path. He is still the caged bird. In terms of identity, though, the narrator is also given another identity to follow as they present him with a new name. Few ask what his name is but presume that they must make him into something else.

By creating a further pretense in himself, the narrator can consequently no longer live with Mary who appreciated him for himself, as very few people do in the novel. He is told that he must move and will spend many moments later in the novel trying to get back to her house. Yet he agrees to make the change very easily. He suggests that a change of clothing will transform him into the new name he has acquired. As he comments, he would strip himself further of his own assets and get rid of his hat in order to take on his new assignment. But does he really believe that by shedding his clothes he can make a new man underneath? It appears that the yam did not teach him much of a lesson after all. He speaks of needing to catch up, with the history of science, with the fast people in the Brotherhood, and with time. The clock back in his room ticks with an urgent need to catch up, he remarks. One can almost hear his grandfather laugh as the narrator has begun to run even faster.

Chapter 15 Summary:

The narrator wakes up the next morning to the sound of loud banging, apparently in protest to the heat not working. Getting out of bed, he cannot take the banging and finds himself banging back. Standing by the pipe, he notices a figure of a Negro with overly exaggerated features which he determines is a bank. Disgusted that Mary is keeping the object around, he takes it to hit the pipes and the head breaks off. Just then, Mary is heard outside his room and asks if he is alright. Not wanting her to see the broken figure , he dresses quickly and join her for coffee. She notices that he is not really listening. He tries to bring up the money he has received to pay her back but is not sure how to go about it. She tells him not to talk about his debt, so he tries another tactic, finally convincing her that he won money playing the numbers. He gives her a hundred dollar bill and says that he is going to see about a job.

Needing to go shopping for new clothes before he calls Jack, he leaves Mary's. The broken bank is still with him and he tries twice to dispose of it on the street. Each time, someone seems to suspect him of pulling off some crime by dropping the package and returns it to him. Finally he puts it in his briefcase. He sees the story of the eviction in the paper and feels proud at the mention of his rabble-rousing. Reaching the stores, he then buys an expensive suit and accessories. He contacts Jack and is shown his new apartment after he finishes shopping.

Analysis

The narrator wakes up the next morning in a huff because someone is banging loudly on the pipes. He mentions that he feels "sick at heart" when he realizes that the heat has gone out during his last day staying with Mary. However, he refuses to listen to his body and his intuition and instead rises from bed, hurrying to catch up as was noted during the last chapter. His last day also brings about the surprise of finding an offensively distorted and Negro modeled bank. He runs around his room first to the pipes and then to this bank, acting out with more rage than at almost any other point in the novel.

The bank's structure is such that the hand flips the coins into the smiling mouth. The degrading Negro image must be fed with money to be kept happy. The "self-mocking image" drives the narrator crazy and he uses it to smash the pipes with. The narrator notes that in his hands the bank looks more like it is being strangled than like it is smiling. It then breaks apart spilling its coins as the narrator yells at his neighbors to stop acting like uncivilized rural Negroes. He destroys the object that he identifies them with but more importantly he attempts to destroy the fear inside of himself. The bank is a metaphor for the recurring nightmare of his laughing grandfather. It is a character yessing the white man, or "acting the Negro", and on the morning of his new role in society, the narrator cannot stand being reminded of this attitude. And still it also strangely echoes an earlier moment at the battle royal, where he must dive for what he thinks are gold coins. Filling his pockets with coins, consuming them, he is also filled to the throat with money as the bank is until it bursts.

The narrator is not able to get rid of the bank and its broken image. He has attempted to move on from his past but it strangely remains with him and haunts him through and through. Twice he tries to drop off the broken bank but is caught both times. The people who catch him are employed because he is artificially shedding what is still a part if him, which still consumes him. He may try to take on a new identity, but instead he must stash the broken Negro in his briefcase and carry it with him. The briefcase then sits on the table in his new apartment as he reads over the material of the Brotherhood. He wears new clothes and has a new apartment. He showers and feels clean and refreshed, but the broken image still sits right in front of him.

Chapter 16 Summary:

That night, the narrator is picked up by brothers for a rally they are to speak at in Harlem. The narrator had looked over the materials they had given him and is told that he can watch the other speeches and then speak last. The event takes place at a boxing arena and the narrator sits worrying over how his speech will be received. Feeling extremely self-conscious, he realizes that he is becoming someone new and different from his college days. He goes out to stand in the alley to calm his mind and sees himself taking on the new role. Noticing the police on horseback nearby, he hurries back inside .He is told the police are to protect them, then Brother Jack speaks first to the audience. Suddenly it is his turn and he takes the stage, giving first a bad impression because of his nervous, raspy voice. Making a joke to clear the air, he draws from his old experience as an orator to move the audience. He is unable to remember the technical aspects of the materials he had read, but speaks powerfully about dispossession and being an uncommon people and wins the crowd over. Reaching a pause in his flow of words, he turns the speech to his own life. Jack warns him not to lose his effectiveness, but he shakes him off and continues in his emotional line. He announces to the audience the he feels more human, ending his speech crying.

The audience goes wild, but the Brothers seem less pleased. Surprised at their reaction, he learns that they disapprove of the rawly emotive quality of his speech and yearn for a more rational, scientific approach. They found him to be dangerous and backwards. Jack however says that he was powerful and the approach of the Brotherhood only needs to be learned. The narrator is to be sent to months of paid training with Brother Hambro. The narrator returns to his apartment exhausted and rethinks the course of his speech, recognizing that his manner had actually been quite different than in college. He is optimistic about his future in the Brotherhood.

Analysis:

It is not a coincidence that for the second time in the book the narrator is asked to make a speech in an arena which also doubles as a boxing ring of sorts. Though not as humiliating an experience as the battle royal, the speech he must give for the Brotherhood has him wait until the end of the night before he speaks and has an element of failure directly connected with it. When the narrator first arrives at the arena, he is led in and given instructions as he was for the battle royal. He knows that he must please the audience with this speech in order to advance any further in this vein of his life as was true in chapter one as well.

The first objects he sees in the waiting room are pictures of prize fighters on the wall. He tells the reader that he never thought he would be in the arena of which he had heard his father speak of the popular fighter who lost his sight in the ring. The narrator decides that it must have occurred in the ring he is present at, thus placing the sight of the blinding in the same ring where he must fight for a position among the Brotherhood. He must fight for acceptance, as he did in the beginning of the story, but he also must accept the consequences of blindly following a movement he knows little about. He notes that the fighter in the picture is so battered by his fight that he could be any man of any nationality. The metaphoric connotations are powerful by creating this parallel image of the narrator who was forced to box in order to go to college and now whose identity will be further blurred as he fights to take on the persona of a new name and lifestyle.

Ironically, he experiences double vision in the moment where he is so textually connected to being blind. The idea of one seeing himself as he feels while simultaneously seeing himself as he is perceived by others is a literary device which has been employed since at least the pages of prominent Afro-American scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his work, The Souls of Black Folk. The moment of double sight enables the reader to have a better understanding of how it feels to be a member of a subordinated people in that the reader can see how one's personality is inevitably split by the knowledge of themselves and of the self which most of society refuses to see beyond. By employing this allusion to the black literary tradition, Ellison provides deft social commentary on the state of the narrator, a state which finds him self-conscious, examined , unreal, blind, and battered. He says to the reader it was as if he stood simultaneously at the opposite ends of a tunnel, "as when you see yourself in a photo exposed during adolescence". He is being encapsulated by the Brotherhood into a new name while simultaneously being aware of his own body and soul. Ellison states that the narrator hears the whir of the hospital machines directly before he takes the stage to speak, feeling uncomfortable but pressing on nevertheless.

The speech he gives, however, is far from what the Brotherhood wants from him. He speaks from his heart, nearly crying at the end of the speech. Many Brothers, however, think he has done more danger than good. His oration is not prewritten and he notes that he forgets the technical aspects of the Brotherhood he is supposed to address. After he finishes, the Brothers drag him out of the arena and criticize his technique. He will have to be trained to not address his primitive emotions. He will have to be indoctrinated into the Brotherhood and their scientific ideology in order to be effectively a part of the machine they would like to run. He embraces the chance to show them how much he can learn about the running of their machine, quickly dismissing the image of his grandfather who suggests that all is not as well as he wishes it to be.

Chapter 17 Summary:

Four months later, the narrator receives a call from Jack and is taken to a bar. He is disappointed that it the meeting is not a call to action but realizes that Hambro would have mentioned if something was to happen. He thinks over the training which had been more work than classwork in school as he had daily reading, discussions, and speakers to hear at night. Jack asks him about Hambro. He tells the narrator that he has heard good reports and warns him to not let the material master him. Then, he gives the narrator the surprising news of his assignment to become chief spokesman in Harlem starting the next day, with the orders to persuade many to join while keeping in line with the discipline. Jack takes the narrator to see where his office will be located and they run into Brother Tarp, whom he is told is reliable and vigorous for the cause.

The next morning at the office, the narrator is introduced to the Brothers and Sisters in Harlem as their new spokesman. Jack tells them he has been hired to increase membership and arouse interest. Suddenly, Brother Tod Clifton enters the meeting late. The narrator recognizes him as a possible rival. His reason for his tardiness is a run in with Ras the Exhorter whom the narrator realizes he heard speak on his very first day in New York. Jack reinforces that the organization is against violence and to be wary of Ras.

The committee leaves and the office members work at organizing and dividing labor. Having a chance to talk with Clifton, the narrator likes him as the man is knowledgeable and reassures him that their actions will be well accepted. That evening they take action and speak to a crowd in Harlem. During the event, Ras and his men edge closer and begin their attack. He and Clifton move into the crowd to face the attackers, Clifton closing in on Ras himself. Ras begins to yell accusations at the men, criticizing their friendly relations with whites and calling them traitors. He rants on about the lost potential of the intelligent, handsome Clifton and how he would have killed him otherwise. The narrator tries to talk sense but Ras rejects him. Clifton strikes him down again and finally, the narrator succeeds in pulling him away. Clifton comments that perhaps Ras has to live outside history to stay sane.

The narrator gets under way in his work the next day, calling community leaders who fall right into line. Tarp gives him a portrait of Frederick Douglass to hang in his office. Working feverishly, the weeks fly by and he is able to organize a parade to consolidate support with success. He thinks back on his past and realizes that he has reached a place that would have satisfied him even had he stayed in college. It had been an unexpected transformation. His life is ordered and successful and he is pleased.

Analysis:

When the narrator is called late at night by Brother Jack to meet, he hopes that it is a call to action. The bar where they meet has startling pictures on the wall which the narrator is drawn to. The narrator focuses on two paintings which Jack will define as sheer barbarism and the image of a steel society. These classifications are interesting as the paintings they belong to are a bullfight and a pink and white girl on a beer ad, respectively. The bullfight shows a matador just missing the charging bull that he has been provoking with the red cape whereas the girl ad clearly says that it is April One, otherwise known as April Fools Day. The narrator had felt that the bullfighter picture presented grace, setting up a clear contrast with Jack's vision of it. Furthermore, Jack's vision of the steel society is to be construed as foolish by the reader. The message is: April Fools! He is not correct in his assumptions. Thus, when Jack praises the narrator on his work with Hambro, the Brotherhood trainer, the narrator's eyes quickly shift to yet another painting he had not noticed earlier. In this painting, the matador is being thrown into the air by the bull's horns. Similarly, the narrator is swept along by the Brotherhood ideology, manipulated and tossed by the training. He attempts to master the ideology as the matador tries to control the bull, but as the picture teaches the reader, he will not be able to attain that control. It is foolish as the other picture implies, to attempt the sort of false classification of his life and attitudes which he attempts. By agreeing that he will try to master it however, Jack is satisfied and gives him his first assignment. It was mentioned in earlier pages by the narrator that Jack had red hair. Perhaps, in that sense, one could make the symbolic leap that Jack represents the red cape which teases the narrator and manipulates him. Jack can only be undone when, as the bull succeeds in the last picture, the narrator overcomes the manipulation and throws the training aside.

The raw power of the black bull who finally succeeds in avoiding victimization by the matador in the bar pictures is also an image which can be applied to the character of Ras the Exhorter. The narrator and Tod Clifton, who is described as a perfectly chiseled man, run into Ras at the first street meeting which the narrator arranges. Ellison writes that Ras looked down at Clifton with the kind of rage which he describes as "bull-angry". The allusion to the pictures which the narrator had seen in the bar create another pair of characters which could fulfill the figures portrayed: Ras as the bull and Clifton as the matador. At this point in their relationship, Clifton is able to keep Ras at bay, but the battle is close. He nearly cuts Clifton's throat when he gets his knife but cannot bring himself to do so because of the high esteem he holds Clifton in. He says that he may be killing his black king. Yet, bull-angry and consumed by raw rage, Ras struggles against Clifton until the narrator drags him away. Clifton cannot help but throw in one last punch, as he tries desperately to resist what Ras is saying. The narrator himself is not at the point yet where he can be hurt by the exhortations of Ras. He is proud of the dignity and patterned discipline of his new life. Yet as he uses the word "dominated" to explain how the Brotherhood has embraced him, we know that he has simply become further blinded to the tricks of the red flash of Jack's cape.

Chapter 18 Summary:

The narrator comes across an anonymous note in his mail which alarms him as it warns him to go slowly and carefully so he can continue to work for his people without being cut down. Alarmed, he questions Brother Tarp to see if he has any enemies. Tarp reassures him, noting how some of his plans had met with criticism at first but had become well supported and successful. He then shares some of his history with the narrator, relating his time on a chain gang and giving to him the broken link he has saved from breaking through after nineteen years. He accepts the token out of respect for the man.

Brother Wrestrum visits as well on the day of the mystery note, and incites suspicion with the narrator because he seems meddlesome. He speaks of a change being needed and warns that they must watch themselves. He criticizes Tarp's link as being an emotionally dangerous and dividing piece of the past. Stressing the need for real brotherhood, his idea is for a Brotherhood emblem interests the narrator. He agrees to alert the committee of the idea.A phone call interrupts their conversation and the narrator is asked for an interview by a respected publication. The narrator agrees to be interviewed by a Harlem publication after trying to get them to speak to Clifton, mainly to annoy Wrestrum who had been motioning to him on what to say.

Two weeks later, the narrator attends a strategy meeting. Unexpectedly, an interrogation begins concerning the narrator's work. Wrestrum has brought charges against him to the committee. Wrestrum announces that the narrator is a danger to the Brotherhood and charges him with attempting to overshadow and dominate the Brotherhood. He presents the article the narrator was interviewed for as evidence, crying that he is an opportunist and has illustrated himself as the Brotherhood instead of part of it. Wrestrum also names an unknown plot against the Brotherhood that the narrator has evolved, through which he trains supporters to only listen to him, for example. The narrator defends himself but the committee must talk it over. They decide that the article is not harmful but state that they will need to investigate the other claims. Until the accusations are cleared, the narrator has the choice to become inactive or to speak on the Woman Question downtown. Angered but determined not stop speaking, as that is his job, he agrees to the new assignment.

Analysis

Brother Tarp, whom the narrator calls into his office when he receives an anonymous note warning him to be careful in the white man's world, is instantly linked with the character of the grandfather. Tarp notices that the narrator looks as if he has seen a ghost. The narrator sees his dead grandfather's face on Tarp when and is only able to look him in the eyes when the vision disappears. In this manner, Ellison is drawing Tarp as another warning figure for the narrator. Tarp's story, which he relates wholeheartedly to the narrator, illustrates his punishment for protecting his family from the white man. He is part of a chain gang for the nineteen years but comments that the punishment was never fully paid and will never be in the terms his oppressors wanted. He makes the significant point that he received his punishment for saying No. The consequences when a black man says no to a white man is contrasted by the grandfather's dying notion of yessing a white man to death. The two men provide two different options of resisting the white power, neither of which the narrator is capable of discerning against or deciding between at this point in his narrative. Tarp gives the narrator the chain link he broke to escape the chain gang to give the narrator strength. The narrator acknowledges to himself that he does not really want the link but takes it from the old man out of respect and sympathy for him and his condition. However, he subconsciously must reflect on the inherent power associated with the symbolic link as he will keep it with him for the rest of the novel, often grasping it in times when he is being attacked or questioned. Tarp himself is a link to the deep and dire struggle against oppression. Tarp was forced to escape from actual chains whereas the narrator is kept running by the men in power who have stripped him of his own meaning but whom he runs to please. By giving the narrator the link, Tarp is enabling him with the symbolic power to escape his oppressors. First, though, he must discover the power within himself in order to use the link. Because of this power, the character of Wrestrum is disgusted by the link. As one of the power structure, he finds the symbolic weight of the chain link to be dangerous. He makes the ironic point that the link is " a good reminder of what our movement is fighting against".

Wrestrum surfaces again later in the chapter when the narrator is called down to a committee meeting and brought up on charges that Wrestrum has accused him with. The support the narrator has gathered in his community alarms the Brother, who claims that he is a betrayer to the movement. Wrestrum's name sounds similar to the word restroom and takes on the connotations suggested by that reference. He is a dirty and undignified man, jealous of the narrator's success. The narrator notes that the dirty, childish interrogate makes him feel as if he is back in the South and, more notably, like he is naked. Although he has bought an entire new wardrobe to join the Brotherhood, in one swoop the narrator has again been stripped down to nothing. He comments that he feels empty and devoid of feeling. Yet instead of fighting back as the link he has received from Tarp would suggest, he admits that they have a logic he must accept because to be a part of the Brotherhood, one must give himself completely. By allowing himself to dissolve and accept, he sticks himself further in the muck of Wrestrum's lies and in the inevitability of his own invisibility.

Chapter 19 Summary:

Frustrated by the move but willing to try it, he gives his first speech with enthusiasm. A woman approaches him after in hopes that he will talk over some points in the ideology. She is beautiful and persuades him to come over for coffee. He learns that she is married and they talk further on ideological concepts. The concepts turn more into her complimenting the primitive force behind his speeches. Thank to the wine they have instead of coffee, the narrator feels at ease to talk at length on his ideas for the Woman Question. Soon, she leads him into the bedroom, ignoring a ringing telephone.He resists for awhile asking about her husband and making her get the phone, but finally gives into her seductive ways. Her husband appears during the night but appears not not alarmed by the narrator's presence. Still he dresses quickly and leaves.

The affair stays with him though he does not see her again, as he is frightened that the Brotherhood will find out about her and use it against him. He wonders if the husband was some part of a test. He calls the woman but is too embarrassed to ask her. He sits paranoid in his office the next day but by late afternoon realizes that they would have already called if there was a problem. A week or so passes and he watches for changes in the Brothers towards him, but detects none. Soon he is summoned to another emergency meeting which alerts him to Clifton's disappearance and reinstates him in Harlem to deal with the resulting crisis.

Analysis:

The narrator's struggles with the definition of humanity. He has an affair with a white woman who feigns interest extreme interest in the Brotherhood's ideology concerning the Woman Question. Though seemingly dangerous to him as she is white and seductive and rich and married, he notes that beyond all of those qualities he felt comfortable with her because she was still human. In a sense, their statures in American society are similar because they are both forced into submission and oppression, she being a woman and he being black. It is not surprising that her husband is absent and returns later in the night, unconcerned that she is openly cheating on him because she has become nearly invisible as well. Therefore she too is given no name by Ellison.

Yet in her relationship to the narrator, she is able to dominate since she creates a division among his thoughts. He is painfully divided on how to feel and does not know how to react to her persuasive seduction. As he comments, he wants "both to smash her and to say with her". She edges him closer to her large white bed and one is reminded of Trueblood's dream where a white woman in her manor house appears out of a clock, out of time, and sinks into her large bed. This threat to Trueblood is manifested in horrible reality as he finds himself raping his daughter, his own flesh and blood. Similarly, the narrator is strangely related to the woman but also falls victim to her, sinking into her seductive bed. He cannot help but feel trapped by the situation and takes off running. He escapes from her bed and her husband, running out in the middle of the night and spends the entire next week worrying whether he was tricked into some scam by the Brotherhood. He continues to run, controlled by other minds. Instances in his life have no meaning outside of the Brotherhood. Consequently, when he learns that Clifton, one of his best friends, has disappeared, he thinks not of Clifton as much as the relief that the pressure has been taken off of himself.

Chapter 20 Summary:

Returning to his old post, he finds that much is changed in the short time he has been gone. Brother Maceo, a good contact, is not where the narrator expects to find him, at the Jolly Dollar bar near his office. The other men in the bar treat him like a stranger when he greets them as brothers and Barrelhouse, the bartender, has to calm them down. He tells the narrator that much of the community feels similarly to the men in the bar, that the Brotherhood has let them down.Returning to his office, Tarp has disappeared too and the decorations in his office were stripped away.

The next morning, many members appear at the office who he sent to look for Clifton. However he knows that the atmosphere is still not right and he suspects that a committee meeting may be occurring without his notification. He runs to where the meetings are held and hears that it has started. Angered by the obvious offense, he strangely decides to buy new shoes, making him a little lighter of foot. By chance, he finds Clifton performing on the street nearby. Not aware who the man is at first, he watches Clifton display a dancing, paper Sambo doll accompanied by a catchy spiel. Disgusted and intrigued, the narrator slowly realizes the street seller's identity and their eyes meet. The police notice the performance and Clifton lifts his items and takes off. Left on the sidewalk bewildered, the narrator remarks that Clifton is out of history and decides to forget him. He heads back to the office, but notices a police chase. Feeling somewhat responsible for Clifton, he follows in case he will need to pay a fine. Clifton resists the arrest however and fights back. Frozen, the narrator watches Clifton crumple to the ground and realizes that he has been shot. He attempts to help but the cops do not allow him to come closer. Finally they ask him questions about Clifton and tell him that he is dead.

Wandering back to his district, his mind turns over the events and he questions Clifton's motives. He is upset at the unjust killing and feels he must act. Remarking how many men stand outside of history, he is glad to have found a place in the Brotherhood. He still questions if he is right and for the first time notices many of the people around the neighborhoods which he has not been able to help. He realizes that he has been asleep and ignorant.

Analysis:

With Clifton's disappearance, Harlem seems to have become distorted and changed. The district does not resembles the place the narrator left, but one he has seen before. Visions from his past appear in the text. He passes men in the street who are kneeling as though looking for lost coins, much as he and other boys once did after the battle royal. Moreover, he finds himself nearly at Mary's door but quickly turns and runs the other way. The Brotherhood greeting he gives in the Jolly Dollar is met with criticism and disdain. The narrator feels as if he has entered another world. The game has changed its rules but he has not been told, as he often felt in the hands of Dr. Bledsoe and at the paint factory. In this confusion, he hopes to talk to Brother Tarp who could reassure him like he once did when faced with the anonymous note. Tarp however is gone too. Tarp had offered a way to face his situation and the narrator had not taken advantage of it. Instead he accepted his mission to leave Harlem in order to accommodate the Brotherhood. It appears as if his exit from Harlem has resulted in the exit of supportive members and the positive changes he had created as well.

The narrator is made glaringly aware of his dispossession from Harlem and the Brotherhood when he reaches the strategy meeting to find it already in session. The district is altered and he is no longer welcome at Brotherhood meetings. Not a part of Mary's life and no longer fully welcomed by the Brotherhood, the narrator wanders the streets much as he did before the eviction. The connection exists because he fulfills the role first played by the old couple. His house has thrown him out onto the streets. In this place of dispossession, the narrator buys new shoes because he feels the need to possess something of his own. Thus, by giving his running feet new wear he feels temporarily rejuvenated. He finds his desire for new shoes to be a strange need but it temporarily satisfies the void left by his race for identity.

The Sambo doll that Clifton is found to be selling is an allusion to the Negro bank that the narrator had found in Mary's apartment. Both are disgustingly degrading toward African-Americans, promoting stereotypical features and actions. That Clifton has moved from an important member in the Brotherhood to the position of Sambo progenitor places him outside of history similar to how Clifton described Ras in their fight scene. Cracking underneath the deep hypocrisy the Brotherhood represents and which Ras exhorted, Clifton moves to be a symbol of the other extreme. Perhaps, the reader must wonder though, if Clifton had fallen into the advice given by the grandfather. He is yessing the white men to death. The police men note something more harsh and bitter in Clifton than his being an illegal vendor. Clifton was tired of fighting back the fears he felt when challenged by Ras and so makes a complete turn and attacks from the underbelly. In this too he fails. As Clifton sings in his advertising jingle, Sambo is more than a toy, he is "the twentieth century miracle". The miracle of blatant oppression and inequality keeps the narrator running . He tries to avoid the message of the toy which is the miracle of accommodation. He too has been made to dance, controlled by the Brotherhood, but he wishes to erase the Clifton episode from his mind. Ironically, he instead takes comfort in knowing that he has found the Brotherhood and decides to make a greater push toward bringing others in as well.

Chapter 21 Summary:

The narrator cannot get Clifton out of his mind and criticizes himself for not using the event of the Sambo performance to educate the crowd. Looking at one of the dolls he had taken from the scene, he realizes that Clifton had been making it dance by an imaginary thread. His thoughts shift to self blame and then he wonders how he should react to the media about the event. He is interrupted by young members of the community who ask if Clifton's death is true. The narrator plans to revive the neighborhood sentiment and to save Clifton's identity by holding a grand funeral. He sends the loyal members out to round up as many other members as possible. The narrator tries repeatedly to reach headquarters of the Brotherhood but can contact no one. Pushing ahead on his own, he organizes the funeral and meetings to rouse support.

At the funeral, the turn out is large and brings members that the narrator had not seen since returning to Harlem. They view the death as their hope being shot down mercilessly and unnecessarily. A slow procession with banners and a band march solemnly toward Park. The narrator wonders about the crowd, whether they are connected to Clifton, attracted to the spectacle, or see the event as an outlet for their grievances. The marching procession begins to sing and the narrator is envious of the man who is not ashamed to start the old slave song. Once they reach the park, the crowd expects the narrator to speak but he does not know what they want to hear. He shouts for the crowd to go home as they did nothing to prevent the state which created the tragedy. He repeats Clifton's name many times and gives characteristics of the man. He speaks with a tone of disillusionment and is not pleased when it is over at how he has spoken. A preacher steps up to finish the ceremony. Walking back through the hot, decaying streets, he cannot help but feel tension and that something has to be done.

Analysis

The narrator hates the doll like something alive because the sentiments it represents do live in him and the society which causes him to be invisible. The narrator is the doll being forced to dance and run around, pulled by the invisible strings of the Brotherhood's power, along with Mr. Norton's, Mr. Emerson's, and Dr. Bledsoe's power. The narrator is surprised to find that Clifton had been controlling the doll's dancing through an invisible black thread, but the reader should not be. Although his work is degrading and socially backwards, Clifton has taken control of his destiny instead of allowing himself to be played like a fool any longer. The policemen could not allow Clifton to sell any sort of power and he must be shot down The narrator is correct in his assumption that entertainment of the type which Clifton produced equals political death, but he does not understand the reasons why and that he too is destined for a similar fate. He does realize however that the only way to save the integrity of Clifton is to destroy the possibility of his being remembered for the dolls.

When the funeral procession reaches its end at a park, the narrator is asked to speak but much like his first speech with the Brotherhood, he has nothing prepared. Thus he must speak from his heart. The voice which speaks out of him struggles with the invisibility which is threatening to smother Clifton and his memory. In order to deny Clifton's erasure, he must give him a name. He begins nearly each part of his speech by directly naming Tod Clifton and then working to describe him as a man. He admits that Clifton had flaws but also blames the community who did not try hard enough to stop his death. He feels that the speech is failing because it lacks a political nature but it strikes the crowd because Clifton had gone beyond politics. He tried to pull the strings of the establishment as the white men did and was shot down. As the narrator notes, Clifton was full of illusions. In this sense, he ran from the cops but could not escape. Finally beginning to realize the significance of Clifton's fall, the narrator leaves the funeral and sees not a crowd but individual faces. The concentration in the masses instilled in him by the Brotherhood is beginning to leak away. Acting without the committee's permission, he feels the tension of his community and resolves to act on it.

Chapter 22 Summary:

The Brotherhood committee is waiting for him when he gets back to his office; he is not surprised to find them there. The room is dark with one light bulb burning. Jack asks him how the funeral went. The narrator replies that it brought the people out who had stopped supporting them and that since he could not reach the committee beforehand he had acted on his personal responsibility. The Brothers pick up on this phrase, repeating it, until the narrator asks what he did wrong. They lecture him on patience and discipline, Brother Tobitt especially throwing in his jabs.

The reason they are so angry is the nature of Clifton's death, as he was selling such a degrading object when he died. They call Clifton a traitor to which the narrator responds that the shooting of an unarmed man is more important than obscene dolls and that the new program they had been using has lost much support. Tobitt justifies his comments by saying that he is married to a Negro girl. Not impressed, the narrator continues to jab back, mocking him.

The argument continues until Jack responds to the narrator that he was not hired to think because the committee should think for all its members. Reallizing what rebelling had gottn Clifton, the narrator tries to back off but has already gone too far. He predicts that if the Brotherhood does not follow through with the spirit that was raised at the funeral they would lose much support. He and Tobitt continue to spar and the narrator finally admits that the community is accusing the Brotherhood as betraying them. He asks if Jack believes he is their great white father. In the heat of the discussion, Jack rises to respond and his glass eye, which the narrator did not know about, falls onto the ground. The narrator can only stare although Jack continues to lecture. Jack uses the eye as an example of how little the narrator knows about the organization. His gloating about sacrifice angers the narrator and he realizes that the committee does not even see him. They get up to leave warning him to stay aware of discipline and to watch his temper. Left alone, the narrator realizes that after that night, he can never again be the same.

Analysis:

The interrogation scene set up following the funeral mirrors strongly the interrogation the narrator goes through with Dr. Bledsoe after chapel. The lighting throws shadows over the group waiting for him because only one light bulb illuminates the room, reminding us of the lighting in Bledsoe's office. The stark lighting allows the narrator to discern the characters sitting in the room in a more realistic light than he had previously been able to. He is not surprised to see them waiting for him and he notices that the smile Jack gives him goes no further than his lips. The pretense that Jack has created repeatedly throughout the novel and which fooled the narrator is starting to become more evident to him.

The reader hears another echo of an earlier interrogation scene, even before that of Bledsoe's office, when the committee demands the narrator repeat a phrase he had used. In the scene of his speech at the battle royal, the narrator erroneously uses the term "social equality" instead of "social responsibility". Realizing his mistake, he apologizes for it quickly. In front of the Brotherhood committee however he chooses the term "personal responsibility" and sticks to it, replacing "social" with "personal" in an attempt to avoid the invisibility they are pressing upon him. They are appalled that he thinks he has the authority to claim personal responsibility and one member points out that he has become a danger to the Brotherhood because of his claim. His purpose to the Brotherhood is finally spelled out explicitly when Jack tells him he was not hired to think. The committee must strike back and try to silence him. As their puppet, he is not meant to think. Less fooled by Jack's appearance, the narrator is able to ask him if he thinks he is the great white father, his master. This echoes the time at the Golden Day when one of the vets referred to Mr. Norton as the great white father. The attack on Jack reveals his distorted vision when his glass eye falls out of the socket. We have followed the significance of sight and blindness during the novel. Likewise, Jack's eye does not reveal itself as artificial until Jack is fully revealed as such himself. By making him partially blind, an injury he claims he took for the Brotherhood, Ellison implies that the Brotherhood too works as a blinding device. The narrator is slowly beginning to understand the true meaning behind the pretense. As he states, "So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice...yes, and blindness; he doesn't see me". The Brotherhood had been trying control the narrator through a blind leader, through a blind vision and ideology. Yet still not willing to accept that a life could be historically meaningful outside of the Brotherhood, the narrator keeps running. He leaves to go see Hambro.

Chapter 23 Summary:

The narrator goes downstairs to the Jolly Dollar bar and is met with an argument over Clifton's death. He is met by more discussion of it along the streets, realizing that a large group was effected. One group though is led by Ras and he hopes to walk by unnoticed. He asks him to respond and the narrator replies that blacks and whites will continue working together and that Clifton's death will be the start of profound changes. Ras pushes the issue further and the narrator yells back that he should not abuse the dead. He moves away hearing Ras attack the Brotherhood. Noticing some men with dark glasses, he is struck by the idea of a disguise and buys dark, green sunglasses. A woman approaches him calming him Rinehart and he play along at first until she gets mad. He picks up a wide hat and is met by more Rinehart greetings. The big test is Ras's crowd which he successfully passes when he walks by them again. He returns to the Jolly Dollar. Barrelhouse does not recognize him and speaks to him as if he were a zoot-suiter; it is as if he has joined a new fraternity. Noticing Brother Maceo, he approaches him and is met with disdain. A fight nearly starts because the narrator is unable to break his disguise. Barrelhouse breaks it up, telling Rinehart to leave. Amazed at the reactions, he laughingly continues down the street toward Hambro's office to get information about the new program. He is met by more who think he is Rinehart and he learns that he is also a number-runner, a gambler, a briber, and a lady's man. Surprisingly, he discovers that Rinehart plays Reverend too, claiming to lead his followers to a new revelation. The narrator realizes that if Rinehart can use the community in this manner, he should be able to also. He wonders if the committee understands the state of affairs in the world of illusions he has uncovered. Wishing to speak it over with Hambro, he takes a cab to his house.

The narrator cannot shake the thought of Rinehart even as Hambro speaks of the sacrifice of his members toward the new directives. Hambro is unable to explain why, saying he will learn in time. The narrator sees it as the weak being sacrificed for the strong. He feels that he has played a part similar to Rinehart, only using the people for the Brotherhood's ends. Angered, he asks Hambro where the Brotherhood will stop. He leaves depressed and betrayed, thinking back to the betrayal of Bledsoe and Emerson. He decides to stay with the Brotherhood long enough to settle the scores of Clifton, Tarp, and himself. He feels invisible, realizing that he and his experiences are one but it does not matter. He will "yes" the Brothers to destruction as his grandfather had once told him - "somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities". Thinking that he needs a channel into the committees motives, he decides to find a woman who will tell him what he needs to know.

Analysis:

The narrator receives a first-hand lesson on creating and manipulating pretense when he decides to hide behind a zoot-suit disguise of dark glasses and a very wide hat like he has seen many men on the street corners doing. The narrator comes to comprehend the many sides of Rinehart. Each side is used for a different purpose to manipulate a different type of person, whether it be a lover, gambler, cop, or religious faithful. Through the disguise the narrator wears he becomes a man who symbolizes both rind and heart . He has a rind which is the outside shell or personality which he shows to his different audiences. Through the device of synecdoche, his heart is the man who pulls the entire operation together, orchestrating and controlling the movements of all of his personas.

The realization that one man like this can exist throws the narrator into a quandary. He comments that he has been made to feel like he is "crazy and blind". However, his mind is not quite able to make the connection between Jack's blindness and Barbee's blindness and his own. He contemplates whether he should categorize Rinehart and forget about him, as the Brotherhood would advise him to do. The conflict that the idea of rind and heart create within the narrator brings him to recognize that whereas outside of the Brotherhood may mean outside of history, inside means invisibility.

On reaching Hambro's apartment he hears a child singing about Humpty Dumpty. Hearing this song transports him to an embarrassing childhood memory of a church program where he forgets the words. However the import of the song works more symbolically in the story as well. Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall high and mighty but when he makes his fall, no one can recreate and save him. Ever since the image of the yam with the brown syrup cracking through, the narrator has been trying to put himself back together again, to find self-worth and purpose. Yet he has felt continually more disillusioned and blind. Rinehart becomes the symbol for the type of man who can succeed in the cracked world. One must be cracked and give in to the pretense of false personality and artificial promises in order to bring in all of the kings horses and kings men. Otherwise, to be inside of history, one had to be a machine following the scientific orthodoxy that Hambro preaches or a tool giving into to the objectifying experience of the hospital. Faced with his cracked world of machines and Rineharts, the narrator truly begins to grasp how he is an invisible man. Desperate in this realization, he attempts to try his grandfather's attack. By yessing the Brotherhood to their own destruction he hopes to throw the entire process into reversal. He does not realize that Clifton had sought to play the yes role and it cost him his life. Clifton's was a yes role outside of the Brotherhood, but the results were just as dangerous.

Chapter 24 Summary:

He begins his "yessing" the next day and it goes very smoothly. In the afternoon, he meets at headquarter as lies that the community is supporting a clean-up campaign and he hands them a fake list of new members. They were pleased to hear his news, vindicating their new directives. That evening, a birthday party for Brother Jack is held at the Chthonian and he first eyes Emma, Jack's mistress, as a potential source. She is too careful though and he decides on Sybil, a vulnerable, lonely woman married to a high official. She was always interested in him and they arrange a rendezvous for the next night at his apartment.

He sets the mood with candy, flowers, music, and liquor. He makes the drinks too strong at first and tries to bring up politics, both which work against him. Becoming drunk, she casts her taboo fantasies on him, asking him to rape her. He is shocked and reg